When, exactly, did the NFL stop playing football? Wasn't it roughly 14 hours ago? New Orleans, yeah? Superdome. Power outage. Harbaughs. Beyoncé. Since then there's been quite the arid, extended, agonizing off-season. What's it actually been? Twenty-one days? Twenty-two? A little more than the gestation period of a hamster. Long enough! Time to return to the field. Vacations are for shirkers. We are ready and hungry for the football. Bring the football. Football. We need it. Come on!

Phew, here it is: The NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis, an annual, ultra-commodified ritual in which the league puts its incoming class through an elaborate, televised entrance exam. Players sprint, jump, catch, throw and furiously bench-press a 225-pound barbell until their upper body exhausts. There are drills. Catch this pass! Spin around! Now catch this one! It's all very sort of exciting, for the dead, empty cold of February. What the combine mostly proves—once again—is that the people will watch pretty much anything related to football, the nation's most important cultural pastime—after groaning about the Academy Awards.

The value of this combine is famously mixed. There is always the potential for a player's name to be lifted by a startling performance—Texas wide receiver Marquise Goodwin, who competed in the long jump at the 2012 Olympics, ran a blistering 4.27 in the 40 yard dash on Sunday. But there's a long list of NFL stars whose mediocre combine performances gave little evidence of their potential, including 2012 running back Alfred Morris, who was underwhelming in Indy, drafted 173rd, and wound up being the NFL's second-leading rusher as a rookie. On Sunday the NFL Network ran some comical footage of a wannabe quarterback wandering though a combine more than a decade ago. His 40 resembled a man crawling over the top of a cheesecake. But Tom Brady turned out to be pretty good.

It doesn't matter if this doesn't matter. Remember that the NFL is a league that successfully converted a bland series of long-distance phone calls—its annual player draft—into an Oscar night extravaganza at Radio City Music Hall. Football may be a game with very little on-field action (a 2010 examination by the Journal's David Biderman showed there's about 11 minutes of play during an NFL contest), but it brilliantly raised its interstices into an art form. The spaces in between aren't treated as dead air—just an opportunity to dissect the game and propel the obsession. Barely three weeks after the Baltimore Ravens shook the confetti off their uniforms, the combine announces that the mighty NFL is open for business again. (Baseball, meanwhile, rousts itself wearily, like Walter Matthau lifting himself off a living room couch.)

And the NFL combine makes for strange but upbeat television. Optimism oozes. Nearly every player has an upside, is a winner, a gamer, a worker. The truly gifted can "jump out of the gym" and of course "play on Sundays." Anecdote is passed off as evidence. Hopefuls tout determined credentials. (Technical question: Can every motivated player truly be the "first in and the last to leave"? Somebody's got to be second or third to the weight room, yes?) Head coaches look on from stadium seats, resembling lions on high ground. Super Bowl runner-up Jim Harbaugh, a pair of glasses tucked in his collar. Two time champion Tom Coughlin. Bill Belichick, wearing a Trinity Lacrosse shirt, rolling his head in circles in what looked to be a set of very disciplined neck exercises.

But the combine usually looks pretty slick, because it is pretty slick. This year's participants wore garish Under-Armour outfits that appeared to have been designed by a kindergarten finger-painting class. Household names are not abundant in the 2013 class, but there are intriguing sagas like Michigan quarterback Denard Robinson, who is trying to make the NFL as a wide receiver. There's no celebrity quarterback like Cam Newton or Robert Griffin III; the current favorite appears to be West Virginia's Geno Smith, a longtime student of art who was shown amid an interview with the NFL Network analyst Steve Mariucci.

Mariucci: You're into art. What's your favorite medium. Is it pastels, oil, watercolor? What is it?

Smith: Acrylic paint. Watercolor paint.

How this information translates into Sundays is unknown. The most significant aspect of the evaluation process are the official interviews between player and teams, but those aren't shown on TV. The weirdest sub-drama of this year's combine is easily the circus surrounding the Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o, who is still recovering after a bizarre saga in which it was revealed his deceased girlfriend was an elaborate hoax. It's an odd predicament, to say the least, but if you're familiar with the kind of off-field trouble that professional athletes can get into, an imaginary girlfriend doesn't sound like much of a headache for human resources.

But Te'o felt compelled to address the media, which he did adeptly, respectfully answering "No, not right now" when a questioner probed him: "Are you dating anybody in real life?" As if real life for an NFL prospect is challenging enough. The money may be swell, but the top three picks of this year's draft are likely to wind up with a grisly sentence to either the Chiefs, Jaguars, or Raiders.

The NFL combine might not be electrifying entertainment, but what constitutes entertainment anymore? Nothing is banal enough to ignore. You can turn on TV and watch people overcook shrimp or brag about their house cats or mangle the Great American Songbook. Elaborate dramas are constructed from ordinary workplaces and insufferable households. It's OK if you don't want to blow a winter afternoon watching wind sprints. What's important is that football is back. Before you even knew football was gone.

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